Technical Field
The present invention relates to providing targeted advertisements in a video data content stream. More particularly, the present invention relates to synchronizing the targeted advertisement with the video content to allow proper insertion of targeted ads.
Related Art
To date, non-Digital Video Recorder (DVR) based targeted advertising has been constrained for use only in Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (QAM) based systems. This is due to the nature of the Targeted Advertising's (TAD) greatest use case constraint, proper timing. Because a QAM systems data stream is extremely time accurate, moving from a data stream to an advertisement stream in a time aligned manner is not very difficult.
Internet Protocol (IP) based video offers no such advantage. In IP streams, the video, audio and associated data can suffer significant time jitter and thus require larger data buffers on the Consumer Premises Equipment (CPE), such as a Set Top Box (STB), to ensure underflow and overflow conditions are minimized.
At present, the number of available Ads which can be offered is severely limited due to bandwidth constraints in QAM based cable plants. The ability to use IP or IP MultiCast (IPMC) for Ad delivery would allow a system operator to target each household with the entirety of the available ad space, not just a bandwidth constrained subset.
For singlecast or unicast IP delivery of video, targeted advertising can be easily implemented through the use of manifest files (HLS, Smooth Streaming, MPEG-DASH . . . ).
In many applications it is desirable to provide a method for delivering targeted delivery of ads using multicast IP delivery of video. In order to accomplish any kind of time synchronized delivery of IP based Audio-Visual (A/V) multicast content, a method of synchronizing the internal content of the streams must be utilized. This synchronization should use a method which is MPEG compliant, does not adversely affect non-TAD devices, and easily augments existing content streams.